Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Hansard source

The Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Enrolment and Prisoner Voting) Bill 2010 makes a number of undesirable changes to the electoral laws following the High Court judgments in relation to the timing of the closing of rolls and prisoner voting.

There are two minor non-controversial amendments which deal, firstly, with a prisoner being able to remain on the electoral roll, even if they are prevented from voting and, secondly, there is merely an insertion in the interpretive provision to ensure that references in the Electoral Act to an election for a division or similar expressions can operate in the event of a half-Senate election held independently from an election for the House of Representatives. The opposition has no problem with those two non-controversial amendments, but it certainly does have concerns with the two issues dealing with prisoner voting and with the closure of the rolls.

I will begin by talking about the closure of the rolls and how the assertions that are being made—that somehow people were excluded from voting to a worse extent than under the previous legislation—is simply not true. In 2006 the then government enacted legislation saying that the rolls would close for new enrolments at 8 pm on the day that the writs were issued, and, for changes in existing enrolments, three days after the issue of the writs. It did so because, notwithstanding the concerns regarding potential disenfranchisement with an early close of rolls, the government was concerned about the potential for electoral fraud associated with high levels of enrolment activity during the existing seven-day period.

The facts were these: in 2004 the number of transactions that the AEC had to deal with concerning enrolment and changing of addresses was 520,000. In 2007, after the change to close the electoral roll earlier, that number dropped to 263,000. This enabled the AEC to deal with those in a more efficient and accurate fashion. But it is important to note that together with the change in the legislation the government made money available so that the AEC could conduct a much more aggressive campaign to get people to enrol early and in a timely way. It is well to remember that under the existing legislation it is the obligation of an individual to enrol once they attain the age of 18 or become a citizen. That is an imperative, and it is thought of sufficiently seriously that it is a criminal offence not to do so.

So it is most important when we are talking about this issue to realise that it is not about the rush to try to get people on the roll at the last moment—where you can have integrity issues and you can have stacking out in marginal seats with people putting themselves onto the roll at the last minute—but about the fact that you have a prolonged campaign to see that people enrol in a proper time. When the number of transactions dropped to 263,000 that was the result of a 12-month campaign conducted by the Australian Electoral Office.

Even more important is this: in 2004, when there were an extra seven days for enrolling as a new enrollee, and an additional three days to get your address transferred, 168,394 people missed the deadline with that longer period. But with the shorter deadline—that is, when the writs are issued you have got to be on by eight o’clock that day if you are a new enrollee or you have got three days to change your address—we only had 100,370 people who missed the deadline. Not only did we see fewer transactions we actually saw a drop in the number of people who tried to enrol and were unsuccessful because they had missed the deadline. This is clearly because there was a strong campaign to get people back on the roll, and to get them enrolled in a timely fashion. In 2010—

See this speech in context